Flume Quotes

It's always difficult to know if a song needs more than piano, and I worry about my tendency to go in a sparse direction.

It took us three months to finish the arrangement of 'Thunderstruck.'

I've got my own studio, and I've got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I've got stuff that's electronic, orchestral, jazz, I've got rock, I've got metal, you know, I don't have polka.

I feel that Jane's is really a vibe and a time. It wasn't like we were the Beatles. We didn't have crafty pop songs where it sort of didn't matter who played them because they're just really great songs.

I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was very basic. All I wanted was drums and another guitar, and I was just going to sing.

One of the most frustrating parts about songwriting for me is production, but it makes me want to get better at it and ends up being one of the most rewarding parts of it.

You get some confidence in your songwriting abilities and go for the essentials - guitar, bass, drums, vocals. Those are the basic band essentials that have to be in place before you go any further.

We really like having songs where we think the arrangement is just as important as the melodies, even though they're typically not.

Producing just one video is a long process. First, you decide your song, then you have to figure out the arrangement of the song; will you play it on the guitar? Will you make it a music video? Once you figure that out, you record it and then edit it, which can take two to five days to finish.

The editing of a song is largely what makes the song for me and I think that actually if I had started going like 'I want you to burn' it would have pinned that song down to a particular thing and made that song a smaller idea than what it is. By leaving that off it's much more open, broader.

The idea of taking a song, envisioning the overall sound in my head and then bringing the arrangement to life in the studio...well, that gives me satisfaction like nothing else.

Blending is just like writing lyrics or finishing up the song, rearranging and arranging.

What's nice about being a producer is you get to roll the dice more often, and you get to be involved with lots of different kinds of music.

I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was, in a way, very basic. So all I wanted to have was drums and another guitar pretty much playing what I wrote on guitar, and I was just going to sing.

I recorded a lot of songs that I knew I didn't like just because maybe part of me wanted to be nice, maybe part of me just wanted to be in the studio, but I've been learning that it's really important to do what you want to do. Even though I might not write all of it, I am still picking out the songs that I want to do. A lot of people who are writing for me are people I have worked with for a while so they know who I am and what I want. I have a lot of opinions and I have learned that it is absolutely okay to express them and to say, "No, I don't want this."

I wanted to be different and original but still have it be something my fans could get into. There also are some big, beautiful ballads. I told my producers that I wanted tracks that are going to blow up in the clubs, but I also wanted songs that were very melodic and with a lot of instrumentation.

I think a lot of electronic musicians are drawn to starting with texture because the whole reason we're working with electronics is to try to create new sounds or sounds that cannot be created acoustically. When you're doing that, it's nice to be able to just create a different palette for every single song. I feel like a lot of electronic music sounds like...Each album sounds like a compilation more than it does a band.

I knew I had to have a hit. I would get no more chances. Analyzing what they had in common I discovered they had many similar elements: harmonic rhythm, placement of the chord changes, choice of harmonic progressions, similar instrumentation, vocal phrases, drum fills, content, even the timbre of the lead solo voice. I decided to write a song that incorporated all these elements in one record.

Adding instruments to parts of a song and having them somehow find a pocket. That to me was a huge lesson. Like, there's more than 808s in the universe.

Sam [Phillips] wanted I Walk The Line up - you know, up-tempo. And I put paper in the strings of my guitar to get that (vocalizing) sound, and with the bass and the lead guitar, there it was. Bare and stark, that song was when it was released. And I heard it on the radio and I really didn't like it, and I called Sam Phillips and asked him please not to send out any more records of that song.

Once the song is done and recorded, I like to go back and then cut the drums, because then I know exactly what the song needs, and what it doesn't need.

Rap music and rap records used to always be like this: we get one or two shots to a piece cause it was a singles marketplace and when the major record companies saw that it could also handle the sales of the albums then they started to force everybody to expand their topics from 1 to about 10 and you gotta deliver 12 songs, so a lot of times if you took a person who wasn't really developed, and the diversity of trying say 12 different things, you know the companies were like "Cool! Say the same thing 12 different ways."

So when I was working with Amy Winehouse on "Back To Black," you know, she had all these beautiful songs, incredibly well-written and just her on an acoustic, nylon-string guitar. And she'd play them for me, and then I would kind of drum up my idea of what I thought - make a demo with what I thought the drums should be doing, the guitars - like, quite a crude demo.

I do get labeled as a guitar band, but the only reason is that's the instrument I know how to play. The guitar is serving the song I'm writing. But I'm learning how to play keyboard better now so that'll start serving the song as well; it'll be another flavor. I'm not going to switch it up with big, fat drum machine beats and real swoopy synths, but yeah...

Then, you know, the other more-traditional role of the producer in, like, the kind of Quincy Jones sense is kind of part arranger. So you're coming up with, like, these - you hear these songs that are quite bare-bones, and you dream up what's the band doing? What's the rhythm section doing? What's the guitars, strings, pianos - that sort of thing. It's almost like a little toolbox.